To make the microphone work, you have to use the alsamixer command from a terminal window. Make sure that the input source is Mic, and the volume is in the red.

The microphone works with Skype for Linux perfectly.

Modem

One aspect of laptops is that most of them are Winmodems, which are notorious for not being supported in Linux. This laptop however comes with a modem that is part of the sound card, as you can see in the aplay output above.

To get it working, you have to install the sl-modem-daemon package from multiverse.

# aptitude install sl-modem-daemon

Then, edit the file /etc/default/sl-modem-daemon and make sure you have:

SLMODEMD_DEVICE=hw:0,6 SLMODEMD_COUNTRY=CANADA

The key here is that the numbers after the hw: part are the card and device numbers from the aplayoutput above.

I don't use dialup, but configured this in case I need to travel in a place without high speed or wireless.

Wireless LAN

The card was recognized correctly, but because I use a secured access point, and prefer a static address, I modified the /etc/network/interfaces file to add that info.

Problem: Fan speed is high after resume from suspend

After coming back from suspend, the fan works on the highest speed, and this causes considerable noise, and also drains the battery too quickly.

Manipulating the /proc/acpi/themal_zone/TZ00 and TZ01 trip_points file did not make any difference.

This seems to be a general kernel issue, reported in the kernel bugzilla issue #7122, and #5534., and some patches for kernel 2.6.18 available for it. If you have other solutions, please post a comment below.

Initially I thought that this also happens after resuming from a hibernate, however, I do not notice this happening anymore. Either it was never a problem (i.e. suspend was the only case), or a recent update from Ubuntu solved it.

Conclusion

All in all, this laptop is functioning well under Linux. It has all the multiprocessor features that I need. The graphics parts would be nice, but does not bother me much at present. One can only hope to find a solution to the fan high speed after resume.

Did you find that the USB Drivers did not work properly?
When I boot my laptop up with my USB mouse plugged in already, it will work for about... 2 minutes?
I unplug it, plug it in... It doesn't even read that it is there.

If I didn't unplug it then plug it back in... When I put in lsusb in a Terminal... It notices it is plugged in but not after unplugging and plugging it in.

Hello, man, great information. i have a laptop quite similar to yours. i did not know how to use my SD card reader and now it works fine.. but i have a question: how do i add that module to the directory?? when i add it it will it be automatically??? i only try running the command int the shell and it works fine!